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Danah Boyd


Self Description

July 2008: "My name is danah boyd and I am a PhD candidate at the School of Information (iSchool) at the University of California (Berkeley) and a Fellow at Harvard Law School's Berkman Center for Internet and Society. My research focuses on how people negotiate a presentation of self to unknown audiences in mediated contexts. In particular, my dissertation examines how American teenagers socialize in networked publics like MySpace, Facebook, LiveJournal, Xanga and YouTube. I am interested in how the architectural differences between unmediated and mediated publics affect sociality, identity and culture.

My dissertation research is being funded as a part of the MacArthur Foundation's Initiative on New Media and Learning. My research is being supervised by a most astonishing committee: Mimi Ito, Annalee Saxenian, Cori Hayden, and Jenna Burrell.

Prior to my current project, I studied blogging, social network sites (e.g. Friendster, Tribe.net, Orkut...), tagging, and other forms of social media. I have written papers on a variety of different topics, from digital backchannels to social visualization design, sexing of internet interactions to creating artifacts for memory work.

I did my Master's Degree at the MIT Media Lab's Sociable Media Group with Judith Donath (supervised also by Henry Jenkins and Genevieve Bell). My master's thesis focused on how people manage their presentation of self in relation to social contextual information in online environments. As an undergraduate, I studied computer science at Brown University, advised by Andy van Dam. My undergrad thesis focused on how prioritization of depth cues is dependent on levels of sex hormones in the body and how this affects engagement with virtual reality.

My beloved PhD advisor (Peter Lyman) lost his battle with brain cancer in July 2007. I miss him dreadfully.

Outside of academia, I have worked at various non-profits and corporations. For five years, I worked at V-Day, an organization working to end violence against women and girls worldwide. I helped build an online community to support activists around the world and I continue to do volunteer work for them. I have worked as a researcher at Intel, Tribe.net, Google and Yahoo! I am currently an advisor to LiveJournal, Blyk, and Technorati. I have consulted with a wide variety of companies and spoken at numerous conferences and meetings.

On the web, I'm known for two things: maintaining an Ani DiFranco lyrics site and blogging prolifically. Personally, I love music, dancing, politics, reading, and all things fuzzy. At my core, I'm an activist and a scholar."

http://www.danah.org/

Third-Party Descriptions

May 2010: "Part of the reason Facebook’s recent changes are upsetting users is that, in contrast to a service like Twitter, most people signed up for Facebook with the understanding that their information would be available only to an approved circle of friends, said Danah Boyd, a social media researcher at Microsoft and a fellow at Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society."

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/06/technology/internet/06facebook.html

July 2008: "The site took the unusual step of soliciting community feedback and setting up an advisory board with prominent Internet scholars such as Danah Boyd and Lawrence Lessig and two user representatives elected in May."

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080706/ap_on_hi_te/tec_disappearing_freedoms

Relationships

RoleNameTypeLast Updated
Employee/Freelancer/Contractor (past or present) Berkman Center for Internet & Society Organization May 7, 2010
Advisor/Consultant to (past or present) Blyk Organization Jul 7, 2008
Student/Trainee (past or present) Brown University Organization Jul 7, 2008
Employee/Freelancer/Contractor (past or present) Google Organization Jul 7, 2008
Employee/Freelancer/Contractor (past or present) Intel Corporation Organization Jul 7, 2008
Financial Recipient from (past or present) John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Organization Jul 7, 2008
Student/Trainee (past or present) MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) Organization Jul 7, 2008
Employee/Freelancer/Contractor (past or present) Microsoft Corporation Organization May 7, 2010
Advisor/Consultant to (past or present) Technorati Organization Jul 7, 2008
Student/Trainee (past or present) University of California - Berkeley (UC Berkeley) Organization Jul 7, 2008
Employee/Freelancer/Contractor (past or present) V-Day Organization Jul 7, 2008
Employee/Freelancer/Contractor (past or present) Yahoo! Organization Jul 7, 2008

Articles and Resources

Date Fairness.com Resource Read it at:
May 05, 2010 Facebook Glitch Brings New Privacy Worries

QUOTE: For many users of Facebook, the world’s largest social network, it was just the latest in a string of frustrations. On Wednesday, users discovered a glitch that gave them access to supposedly private information in the accounts of their Facebook friends, like chat conversations.

 New York Times
Jul 06, 2008 'Public' online spaces don't carry speech, rights

QUOTE: Rant all you want in a public park. A police officer generally won't eject you for your remarks alone, however unpopular or provocative. Say it on the Internet, and you'll find that free speech and other constitutional rights are anything but guaranteed.

 Yahoo News